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Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

bbc.com

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Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#241

Post by mastazi »

ntSean wrote: post #34
mastazi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent's point is not irrelevant though, did the AI label only people of one specific racial background as primates? The article doesn't really provide any details as it's only a few lines long. The word "primate" in itself is not a slur but it can be used as a slur, as you said, depending on the context, however not much context was given in the article.

There was a discussion of this in a sibling thread with more context. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28416909

But the sibling thread doesn't seem to have additional sources. My point was that this BBC article we are discussing leaves a lot to interpretation and I wish it was more informative.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#242

Post by IncRnd »

ironmagma wrote: post #235
IncRnd wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody said this particular misclassification must occur. But there will be misclassifications, which is what your original question asked. Since you know the answer, why ask the question? That's why I asked you if what you asked was a real question.

Yes they did, I said that. But it was a claim made as a question, because I didn't know whether it was actually true. I still can't demonstrate formally why this would be so, because again, the reasoning and even veracity of the claim is still in question due to lack of anything but a hand-waved answer.

There is no need to formally demonstrate. The veracity is clearly not in question. It must be true, due to the existence of the article we are commenting on now.

If you want to argue for the general case, you can simply prove the negation is false. Since it is incorrect to say that a network trained with a tiny percentage of possible inputs will never misclassify, it is true that a network trained in such a way will eventually misclassify. This is bolstered by training any network and seeing they always will misclassify something.

> Yes they did, I said that.

You didn't say that. You said a misclassification would happen on some inputs. That is different from saying on these specific inputs.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#243

Post by root_axis »

crooked-v wrote: post #189
root_axis wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it embarrassing or an expected mistake to be learned from. I would say it's both. It's embarrassing for Facebook because it looks racist even though it really isn't. The system might be emotionless but the people who interact with it aren't, and we don't expect them to be.

> it looks racist even though it really isn't It absolutely is racist. Racist outcomes are still racist regardless of whether there's a guy in Klansmen robes at the steering wheel or not.

> Racist outcomes are still racist regardless of whether there's a guy in Klansmen robes at the steering wheel or not.

Yes, I understand what systemic racism and implicit bias are, your condescending snark is appreciated.

Anyway, it's not racist because the result is not the product of implicit bias or systemic racism, it's a software bug that would have been possible no matter who was working on this software. As I wrote in another comment: the whole point of ML is to adapt to what is effectively an unbounded set of inputs, pretty much by definition there will be cases where even a team of 100% black people will train a model that, given the correct input, will fail in ways that particularly affect black people.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#244

Post by throwcommonsns »

strken wrote: post #226
throwcommonsns wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a contrarian take that may get me downvoted and unfairly labeled, but I encourage critical thinking instead: I've struggled with people telling me that these FAANG companies have "diversity problems," as a person of color myself. A majority of software engineers are female and male immigrants from East Asia and South Asia. These population centers are some of the most diverse regions of the world. The enginee…

The short answer is that tech companies run diversity programs for three reasons: they believe in righting wrongs, they don't want to be sued for biased hiring practices, and they don't want bad PR. All three require under-represented minorities. Turning it back on you, what should the point of a diversity program be? What's meant to be achieved outside those three goals?

While I certainly understand bad PR (a surprising number of people lack critical thinking skills), what is wrong or biased about hiring for coding positions based on merit-based performance on an objective coding test? Anybody regardless of background or group membership that passes will be hired, meaning it is fair and unbiased, by definition -- that is the diversity program, and if there is some lack of objectivity, that is what needs to be addressed. If that is not the case, then yes, I agree with you, the hiring process would be biased.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#245

Post by throwcommonsns »

ummonk wrote: post #152
throwcommonsns wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a contrarian take that may get me downvoted and unfairly labeled, but I encourage critical thinking instead: I've struggled with people telling me that these FAANG companies have "diversity problems," as a person of color myself. A majority of software engineers are female and male immigrants from East Asia and South Asia. These population centers are some of the most diverse regions of the world. The enginee…

South / East Asia has more than half the world’s population yet doesn’t count towards diversity.

Why not? My point is that it should! What percentage of the US population is from South / East Asia? How does it compare to the representation of others? If it's similar or less, and it still somehow doesn't "count," then we have a diversity problem.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#246

Post by [deleted] »

skissane wrote: post #237
mrpopo wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These population centers are some of the most diverse regions of the world. South Asia and SE Asia, maybe. But East Asia (NE China, Korea, Japan) has actually one of the most ethnically "pure" populations in the world.

> South Asia and SE Asia, maybe. But East Asia (NE China, Korea, Japan) has actually one of the most ethnically "pure" populations in the world. Northeast China–usually defined as the provinces of Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang–does not belong on your list. According to the 2000 Chinese census, about 10% of the population of Northeast China comes from ethnic minorities – the majority of whom are Manchus, but also…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#247

Post by jessaustin »

root_axis wrote: post #149

I think the negative reaction is reasonable. Clearly, if a human did this it would a problem, so why should it be acceptable for an automated system to do the same thing? The fact that it is unintentional doesn't negate the fact that it's an embarrassing mistake. On the other hand, imagine a world where these labels were applied by a massive team of humans instead of a deep learning algorithm. At Facebook's scale, wo…

Clearly, if a human did this it would a problem, so why should it be acceptable for an automated system to do the same thing?

One worries that the corporate overlords are preparing the legal system for completely impune manufacturers of self-driving cars. "Sorry your child is dead; the car did it so there's no one to sue or convict."

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#248

Post by mardifoufs »

nullc wrote: post #163
croes wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FB had a soap dispenser that didn't recognize black people. https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-da...

When the video comes up, facebook displays a message that says it is "false information". (And when you click "why" you get a picture of Arabic text, which can't be copy/pasted into translation software) Shame on you for distributing false information, it's a good thing we have facebook protecting The Truth. /s

The link says that it's partly false because it's an infrared sensor, that doesn't detect any skin color and isn't biased by virtue of not really making any decision. It just dispenses soap when the infrared sensor gets triggered. The problem is that according to the article black skin does not reflect infrared radiation very well (no idea if that's true, but that's the claim here) meaning it's more of a physical limitation than a "defect" as can be argued in the case of AI models.

But the article also says that a counterargument could be that the existence of machines that aren't very suited to a big part of the population can be seen as proof of some latent Racism (to be more accurate, discrimination is closer to what's used in the article) whether intentional or not.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#249

Post by 3grdlurker »

silisili wrote: post #201
3grdlurker wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn’t you apply the same way of thinking to finding a cure for AIDS, or doing interstellar travel, or P = NP, or pretty much any problem that we haven’t solved yet? Just because we can’t solve a problem within our lifetime doesn’t mean it’s not solvable at all. This is one of the most basic principles by which knowledge, and therefore, technology, progresses.

Not at all. If a child could solve the AIDS issue and science couldn't, then maybe. Humans and machines are so different today. Of course machines beat us at number calculations and such. But we have organs that computers don't and can't have. And our brains are much more in tune with using those than power of 2 bit twiddling. As we ourselves don't understand how it works, how can we ever write a machine that does?

Well how do you know that the image recognition error is a fault of the ML algorithm (because we can’t capture how organic minds learn, as you are suggesting) and not of the learning sample?

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#250

Post by q-rews »

tartoran wrote: post #64
q-rews wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the core difference is that one is a honest mistake and the latter is just deprecating. It’s fine if AI calls me “white treehouse” but it’s less fine if it labels me “stupid”, even if my face really looks stupid. The reality is that people have become extremely sensitive about some topics even if they’re not the recipients of the perceived insult.

I don’t think any algo should be in the business of labeling any people period. What you call sensitive is offensive to others as much as you being labeled stupid by the look of your face. It is wrong in your case and it is also wrong in the cases you perceive as sensitive. I actually find it quite insensitive of you to dictate what others should feel based on your experience. And selfish too

> I don’t think any algo should be in the business of labeling any people period.

You’re proving my point. What you’re saying is that we should stop any algo from categorizing anything just to avoid a 0.00001% of hurting someone’s feelings. People like you are going to bring back the dark ages. Go back to Twitter.

Can’t we just treat these incidents as bugs and fix them instead of just fueling the outrage machine?

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